The name Howard Hughes conjures up two
different icons. There's the vintage Hughes, circa the '30s and '40s—the
eccentric and restless and handsome rich kid who loved women, airplanes and
movies.

But that image has largely been replaced
by the wretch he had turned into by the time of his death in 1976—the
feeble, pathetic recluse imprisoned by a combination of his
obsessive-compulsive fear of germs and of the staggering wealth which
allowed this phobia to be fully indulged.

The story of his later years is like an
awful 20th century variation on the Midas myth. Everything he
touched turned to gold, but he couldn't bring himself to touch anything.

The Aviator follows the younger
Hughes, starting—after a brief and troubling boyhood prologue which
connects the hero's complexes to his mother—in the late '20s, when he's
sinking years and millions into his epic WWI movie Hell's Angels,
through to 1947, and the lone flight of his notorious, Brobdingnagian Spruce
Goose airplane.

It was not, I must admit, a film for
which I felt much enthusiasm going in, in part because of the director,
Martin Scorsese, and in part because of the star, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Don't misunderstand—Scorsese is one of
the great film artists of his generation, and his best movies are undisputed
classics. But not much of his brilliance has shown up in his work of the
last few years.

Always flamboyant, his style, especially
in last year's deeply disappointing Gangs of New York, had grown
increasingly chaotic and flashy and uninvolving. And while that delicate
perennial boy DiCaprio is by no means without talent himself, he seemed
laughably wrong for the role of Hughes, and maybe for any character older
than, say, 18.

I'm delighted to have been wrong on both
counts. The Aviator is Scorsese's best film since, probably, Goodfellas,
and one of the most enjoyable epic-scale movies in years.

Here Scorsese, superbly abetted by
cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, keeps his
visual and narrative touch sinuous and unfussy and balanced.

There's nothing routine about the
direction, but you don't have that exhausting sense that he's constantly
trying to dazzle you. And despite his seemingly unshakable callowness,
DiCaprio is strikingly good in the lead, holding the screen convincingly for
the whole three hours.

Working from a solid script by John
Logan, Scorsese uses the glamour and grandeur and technological whimsy of
Hughes' heyday to counterpoint the essential poignancy of the story. Hughes
was no less of a nutjob, by this film's account, when he was courting
Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), or
setting airspeed records, or crashing a spy plane prototype into Beverly
Hills, or grandstanding at U.S. Senate hearings, or assigning industrial
engineers the job of redesigning Jane Russell's bra.

He was just a slightly more
functional—and more libidinous—nutjob, and the obsessive tendencies that
would eventually debilitate him and drive him into seclusion were already
plaguing him.

Along with DiCaprio's star turn,
Scorsese gathered a team of first-rate character players to impersonate the
various stars, starlets, cronies, yes-men and rivals who played supporting
roles in Hughes' psychodrama.

Blanchett and Beckinsale, fine beauties
both, can hardly be faulted for being unable to capture the goddessy allure
of Hepburn and Gardner. Allowing for this near-inevitable shortfall, both do
fine work, especially Blanchett.

Same goes for Gwen Stefani in the small
role of Jean Harlow, though she doesn't resemble Harlow at all. John C.
Reilly is reliable as ever as Hughes' long-suffering right-hand man. As Pan
Am boss Juan Trippe and shameless Maine Senator Ralph Owen Brewster, Alec
Baldwin and Alan Alda both ham a little, and it brings the film an amusing
level of smiling, unctuous corruption.

Whether Trippe and Brewtser were really
the stage villains that they’re depicted as here, or indeed how close to
accurate any of The Aviator is, I certainly can’t say.

I couldn’t tell you the accuracy
quotient of Taylor Hackford’s shapeless but smashingly acted Ray,
or of Bill Condon’s touching, trenchant Kinsey, either.

But all of these films—they’re three
of the year’s best—show that the biopic genre, however disreputable and
untrustworthy it may be as history, still has plenty of power to entertain.